The Exposure website helps photographers to craft beautiful photo narratives and post them online. It is one of a number of tools, including the Everyday and Heyday apps, making it easy to present photography in new ways through video, social-media services and on the web.
(Photo via Exposure)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video showing off scores of photos is worth what? A thousand tweets?

Quite possibly. And now you don’t need to expend much effort to craft that video — or to create other types of photographic montages.

A number of digital tools are making it easier than ever to stitch together images as collages, create photographic journals, or display photographic narratives on the web. Once assembled, you can typically post these to the usual spots, such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube — though one startup, at least, emphasizes the option of keeping these newfangled photographic stories private.

Online slideshows have been around for years, available from websites such as Flickr and Shutterfly, but these apps and web-based tools are moving beyond traditional slideshows to help photographers piece together narratives, of sorts, from their images.

The free Heyday app, for instance, bills itself as an “automatic journal.” As you snap photos with your iPhone or iPod touch, the app creates a journal based on what you’re doing (and what’s appearing in your photos). You’re also able to tag friends, add photographic filters to images, and search the journal based on the places you’ve been. Because it’s intended to function as a journal, with dated entries, the app keeps things private until you want to share them.

That’s all an interesting approach to keeping a record of your life, but Heyday will also create collages from your photos. You don’t have do anything to generate these collages; Heyday does this automatically, as it collects your images. The collages can then be saved to your photo collection and shared online.

Exposure, a web-based tool for creating webpages blending text and images, requires a bit more work, functioning almost like an easy-to-use blogging tool. The service places an emphasis on constructing a narrative around photos — a mix of words and a big, bold display of photographs. By guiding you through a template to let you drop in images, add text and craft a story around your images, Exposure helps you to produce stunningly beautiful webpages — if, of course, you’ve got strong images to use. View the featured pages at Exposure (at featured.exposure.so), and you’ll be wowed by the power of the photography.

Of course, other online publishing tools, such as Tumblr and WordPress, let you combine photos and text, but Exposure specializes in this, and it puts the focus on the photographs. If you value your photos and want to present them as stories (with the images doing much of the storytelling work), then Exposure is worth a try.

The company operates on a subscription model. The service is free for three published posts, or $9 per month (or $99/year) for unlimited posts and special features.

The Everyday app ($1.99, for iOS) helps you to create a video of how your face changes over time. Each day, you take a self-portrait. The app provides a grid to help you coordinate that day’s photo with previous ones. It also will issue reminders to help you remember to take a photo every day. A video of this, at the Everyday website (everyday-app.com), gives a sense of how fun this can be.

Want to track your evolving visage for the new year? Now’s the time to start experimenting with Everyday.

These tools all share something in common. They take photography seriously, and rather than simply letting you apply a filter and toss a photo online, they aim to assist you to create something that’s genuinely well-designed — and to do it with minimal effort.